Foksal Gallery and the Notion of Archive: Between Inventory and Place

Pawel Polit

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On 21 January 1967, Tadeusz Kantor sent an extraordinary message
to Foksal Gallery in Warsaw, the full meaning of which has perhaps
not yet been deciphered. Nevertheless, since the day of its
transmission it has exerted a continuing influence on the artistic
experiments that have taken place at Foksal Gallery and the
direction of the theoretical discussions that developed within its
milieu. The gigantic letter, measuring 2 by 14 metres, was carried
by eight postmen through the streets of Warsaw. Accompanied by
photographers, the men departed from the post-office building and
arrived in the small gallery space, where the letter was received
by a expecting crowd. Pre-recorded audio reports describing the
letter's progress were played out loud at the gallery during the
event, in order to increase the emotional temperature of the
public. Tadeusz Kantor, the 'Man in the Black Jacket', orchestrated
the components of the happening, steering cautiously towards its
prescribed conclusion - the collective destruction of the
letter.

Described in an extant script as its 'formal catharsis', the
final chapter of the happening proposed a new concept of art
object.1 The idea challenged and progressively
undermined the theoretical premises that grounded the new model of
art presentation promoted by Foksal Gallery, which had opened just
a few months before, in June 1966. Formulated by Mariusz Tchorek in
a poetic mode in 'Introduction in a General Theory of Place', these
initial premises posited the model of exhibition-as-work in
response to the most recent developments in art, and served from
that moment on as a reference point in Polish art criticism and
exhibition practice.2

The aim of this text is to describe the dialectical tension
between the principles of the theory of place and the ideas of
Kantor, based on his practice of happenings. This mutual dependence
evolved at the end of the 1960s in the form of a latent conflict
inscribed in the gallery practices. Ultimately gaining ascendancy
by the 1970s, Kantor's ideas influenced the gallery's decision to
promote an analytic model of Conceptualism, thus endowing Tchorek's
theory of place with the status of unfinished project. My aim also
is to reflect on the way in which both Kantor's ideas and Tchorek's
principles of a theory of place influenced the artistic and
curatorial practices that developed in the gallery milieu around
the notion of archive.

The decisive turn in Kantor's oeuvre, marked with his
Letter happening, emerged as a consequence of his stay in
New York in 1965. Confronted with the artistic phenomena he
discovered there, ranging from Neo-Dada to Pop art and Minimalism,
he developed an idea for exhibition display in the storage rooms of
the US Postal Service: 'Not only pictures were to become
"exhibits", but also "ready" objects usually found at a post
office, like parcels, packages, a mass of packs and
sacks.'3 In addition to attempting to take the work out
of the art institution, the project's aim was to demonstrate the
condition of objects that 'exist for some time / on their own,
without an owner, / not belonging anywhere, / without a function, /
almost in a void, / between a sender and an addressee […]. This is
one of those rare moments when an object escapes its
destination.'4 Kantor hesitated to comment upon the
project in terms of an exhibition, and instead wrote: 'This was a
situation […], like a negative of reality.' 5

These ideas of the 'object's vanishing' and of display as a
negative imprint of reality seem to stand in contrast to the
conception of 'place' announced by the founders of Foksal Gallery
in 1966. Tchorek outlined the principles of such an idea of place
in a text he wrote, in consultation with Wiesław Borowski and Anka
Ptaszkowska, titled 'Introduction to a General Theory of Place', a
theoretical statement that assumed the unpredictable character of
the experience of place and its essential opaqueness, making it
possible for the viewer to adopt an engaged attitude within its
range. The notion of place as understood by Tchorek surpassed the
limitations of art theory; it was philosophical in its character
and embraced a vast array of referents. It described not only an
event of art presentation but also a sacred space, or even
signified an unexpected encounter between people. As Tchorek wrote:
'The PLACE is not transparent. What it is, is the actual presence.
There are no criteria of better or more valuable filling of the
PLACE. It may even be empty but its emptiness must be conspicuously
present.'6

The 'Introduction' emphasised the need to challenge the ossified
institutional ways of presenting art that were prevalent at the
time. It recognised conventional modes of art exhibition as
parasitic to the advanced forms of Modernist art, painting in
particular. According to the principles of the theory, the
exhibition inscribes artworks - understood as places themselves -
in the rigid order of display, neutralising their impact and
submitting them to institutional demands. Spurious in its claim to
transparency and neutrality, the exhibition acquires in this manner
an autonomous status, and imposes on the viewers a contemplative
mode of experience. The 'Introduction' argued that this model of
art presentation has to be rejected and substituted by a more
egalitarian and open structure based on the idea of participation:
'It is only in the PLACE, and not outside of it, that "art is
created by all". The PLACE cannot be mechanically fixed up but it
must be incessantly perpetuated.'7 Consequently, the
'PLACE cannot be bought or collected. It cannot be arrested. It
cannot be an object of expertise.'8

Kantor objected to the 'Introduction'. The grounds for this
objection, firstly, was that it took the form of a manifesto, and
thereby assigned its signatories - Tchorek, Ptaszkowska and
Borowski - more relevance than it did actual artistic practices.
However, his argument contradicted the goal behind Foksal Gallery's
experiments in 1966 and 1967, which Ptaszkowska has described as
creating a 'platform of cooperation between artists and critics,
bringing about benefits to both parties and being decisive for
Foksal Gallery's distinct profile'.9

The location of Foksal Gallery's financial and administrative
offices within Pracownie Sztuk Plastycznych (Plastic Arts Studios)
- a state-run organisation responsible for organising different
kinds of public events, from May Day demonstrations to congresses
by the governing Polish United Worker's Party and visits by
international politicians - offered the possibility of using the
studios' whole range of facilities and materials to produce
experimental art. This paved the way for a new gallery model, one
focused on revealing the intricacies of creative processes rather
than presenting works of art in their final form. The introductory
note inserted in the catalogue for the first exhibition at Foksal
Gallery, which opened on 1 April 1966, stated that:

Two aspects will be emphasised in the exhibitions organised
by the gallery. In the first place it will attempt not so much to
show works as 'finished' products, but to reveal certain particular
conditions and circumstances surrounding their creation. Secondly,
the gallery proposes to treat these conditions and circumstances as
organic elements in the display of artworks. What we vote for is
disturbing the sanctioned division between two isolated domains of
artistic activity: a studio, where a work is created, and an
exhibition space, where it is displayed.10

This concept of the exhibition as an organic unity, no longer of
a secondary character in relation to the work of art and an
'artistically active form' in itself, provided a broad theoretical
space for a number of projects presented at Foksal Gallery in those
first two years. This concept was not implemented by means of
artistic orthodoxy; on the contrary, it seems to have initiated a
free play of artistic ideas that were reflective of different
aspects of the idea of place and enriched it with unexpected
connotations. It is worth emphasising the formal aspect of the
notion of place: rather than prescribing the direction of art's
development, it reflected on the very conditions of possibility of
an 'artistic fact' (a notion coined by Ptaszkowska in the
'Introduction').

Projects realised at Foksal Gallery during that period can be
divided, roughly, into three categories. The first one would
comprise exhibitions inferring the principle of spatial arrangement
from the actual dimensions and proportions of the gallery space.
This was the case of installations created by Henryk Stażewski and
Zbigniew Gostomski, both in 1967. The second category would
comprise shows which renounced a static spatial arrangement and
opted instead for a certain degree of interaction with the work.
These would include a series of five quasi-musical events realised
in September 1966 by composer Zygmunt Krauze and three visual
artists: Grzegorz Kowalski, Henryk Morel and Cezary Szubartowski.
Finally, the third category reflected on the trans-individual
character of perception, and included projects by Włodzimierz
Borowski and Edward Krasiński. In his 'Second Syncretic Show',
presented at Foksal Gallery in June 1966, Borowski prevented
visitors from accessing the exhibition space, confronting them with
spiky objects suspended from strings across the entrance. In
addition, he blinded the visitors with a light flashing at regular
intervals, and displayed a red-lit sign on the wall that read
'Silence'. Hiding inside the exhibition space, Borowski observed
the onlookers via rectangular mirrors suspended from the ceiling.
Initiating a process of exchange of glances, he effectively exposed
the relations of power inscribed in institutional strategies of art
presentation. Krasiński's exhibition, which opened in December
1966, included a number of fragmentary objects immersed in
modulated light, creating effects of dramatic rupture. Despite
this, the exhibition produced an effect of coherence due to a
spectacular 'serpent' form - a swirling piece of thick cable
running from the back wall of the gallery to the entrance of the
adjacent room - hanging parallel to the floor, and pointing towards
to the neighbouring office. This form was supplemented by the
disrupted construction placed at the entrance of the exhibition
space - a partly painted welded iron sculpture - and two others in
the main exhibition space, in which the vertical arrangements of
table-tennis balls produced an effect of animated movement. The
complex structures of both Borowski's and Krasiński's installations
involved a multiplicity of viewpoints, echoing Tchorek's ideas
about perception proposed in the theory of place. In another text,
'The Disclosed Picture', published in spring 1967, Tchorek related
the experience of place to the viewer's unexpected recognition of
his or her own presence within a space of display. Referring to the
artistic tradition of the mise en abyme (in this case the
depiction of paintings within pictures), Tchorek suggested the need
for adopting an alternative point of view - the one implied by the
depicted painting - in order to renounce the imaginary bond between
a viewer and the pictorial qualities of a work. 'A painting within
a "picture",' Tchorek wrote, 'is a flash in which we may grasp the
otherwise inaccessible way of our grasping of painting; its
presence may scare us, it may be a warning, a frustration of our
calmness, at last it can mean the loss of confidence in the
legitimacy and competence of the faculty of sight concerning the
art of painting.'11 In other words, in order to actively
be in a place, one has to reflect on one's own
perception.

II.

In 1972, Kantor criticised in retrospect the exhibitions that
took place at Foksal Gallery in 1966 and 1967 as 'camouflaged
Constructivist shows' that followed the conventions of 'artistic
shaping' still rooted, according to his view, in the Modernist
legacy of Constructivism.12 In contrast, he emphasised
the anti-Contructivist character of his own work, its 'tendency
towards dematerialisation' and its 'strong connections with Marcel
Duchamp'.13 He seems to have understood the concept of
place developed within the Foksal Gallery milieu as an artistic
programme in a strict sense, which he then confronted with the idea
of an 'active environment' coherent with his own artistic practice.
Kantor disregarded the formal nature of the theory of place and its
lack of instruction, which could influence particular artistic
decisions; what it suggested was simply an attitude to be adopted
by artists.14

There are, however, more fundamental reasons for Kantor's
disagreement with the theory of place. He associated his own
project of critically reassessing the exhibition-as-work with
processes of degradation he had employed in his work since the
early 1960s. His 'Popular Exhibition' at Krzysztofory Gallery in
Krakow in 1963 seems to have played a crucial role in this project,
as it was then that Kantor decided to submit his own artistic
output to a process of degradation. The show included 937 elements
that did not claim the status of artworks in the traditional sense
of the term. Among these were various 'marginal' manifestations of
artistic activity, such as drawings, designs and theatre costumes,
as well as objects related to the artist's everyday activities -
notebooks, calendars or newspapers - arranged in an alternative
manner to conventional art displays: drawings were hung from
clotheslines and objects were arranged in the space without any
apparent plan, producing a general effect of overload.

By assigning fragments of his own life and work the status of a
readymade, Kantor aimed to shift artistic practices to the 'field
of imagination', and the content of the exhibition 'presented
itself not as material for constructing' - in a reference to
Constructivism - '…but as a room into which objects from my own
past were falling, in the form of wrecks and dummies … strange,
banal, schematic, accidental, mixed up with important ones,
valuable and trivial facts, letters, recipes, addresses, traces,
dates, meetings. It was an inventory deprived of chronology,
hierarchy and localisation.'15

Kantor's interest in processes of degradation that reveal a
negative side of objects - what could be called his version of the
dematerialisation of the art object - coincided with Wiesław
Borowski's conception of the nature of art's transformations
throughout the twentieth century, which he described in terms of
progressive 'elimination of art from art'. Published in 1967 under
the same title in Program Galerii Foksal PSP, Borowski's
text diagnosed an effective neutralisation of Modernism's impact
and of its conventions for making and looking at art. 'A sort of
deserted area, a void is produced,' he wrote. 'It is not a negative
void, but one most real and meaningful. Elimination and negation in
art is by no means an artistic tendency: otherwise it would have
reached its aim long ago. It is an opening of artistic
possibilities not accessible by a simple offering of all
potentialities existing within the art industry.'16

Kantor strongly emphasised the dependence of his practice on the
form of the happening. The idea of elimination and negation in art
proposed by Borowski seems to have coincided with premises which
stood behind not only the Letter happening, but also the
Panoramic Sea Happening that took place on 23 August 1967,
under the auspices of Foksal Gallery. In this event the boundaries
of location suddenly expanded to include the beach and sea at
Osieki, Poland. During the happening, different activities took
place such as conducting waves, 'spreading the stickiness' of sand
mixed with tomato sauce using female bodies, 'planting' rolled-up
newspapers in the sand, staging a tableau vivant of
Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19) and,
lastly, sinking a box containing the Foksal Gallery archive into
the sea.

The change of parameters proposed by the Panoramic Sea
Happening questioned the static and self-contained environment
typical of contemporary art. It forced the work of art into
confrontation with a boundless, unrepresentable or 'impossible'
domain, giving it the status of something 'FORMLESS, / DEVOID OF
AESTHETIC VALUES, / DEVOID OF ENGAGING VALUES, / PERCEPTION-LESS, /
IMPOSSIBLE, / i.e. POSSIBLE ONLY THROUGH
CREATIVITY'.17

III.

Reflected in the compartmentalised structure of Kantor's
happenings is the idea of work as inventory. The very act of
sinking the gallery documentation, illustrative of Kantor's method
of 'embalming' objects - hiding or 'wrapping' them and producing
their negative imprints - signalled a shift, within the Foksal
Gallery milieu, to artistic and curatorial practices focused on the
notion of archive. This is not just the case of projects
investigating the 'perception-less' condition associated with the
idea of archive, but also of several exhibitions which subscribed
to the idea of work as social event. These projects involved a
multiplicity of viewpoints and initiated an interplay of glances,
which reflected the initial principles of theory of place.

As early as 1968, by including photographs of earlier works in
his spatial constructions, Edward Krasiński gave his works the
status of photographic documentation, inscribing them into the
repetitive structure of consecutive recordings, and subjecting them
to an impersonal process of documentation and archiving. In the
series Interventions, which he began in the beginning of
the 1970s, this is applied to the whole exhibition space, as the
horizontal line created by Krasiński's blue strip turns the gallery
space into the subject of a photographic representation. In a way,
these later installations have also been 'pre-assigned' an archival
status.

In his second solo exhibition at Foksal Gallery, which opened on
8 March 1968, Krasiński presented a number of spatial constructions
addressing the 'geometrical' question of the relationship between
the volume of space contained within a cylindrical section of a
pipe and the length of a continuous line of wire coming out of its
interior.18 The exhibition consisted of a number of
cylinders of diverse diameters with flexible wires that, like
insects' antennae, seemed to inspect the space. Krasiński displayed
the works on large pedestals. Following the labyrinthine pattern of
pedestals arranged on the gallery floor, the viewer was expected to
trace the course of the wires running along their surfaces,
providing Tchorek with another occasion to develop the principles
of the theory of place. Tchorek emphasised the works' unusual
scale, through which the institutional conventions of display were
exposed. According to Tchorek, Krasiński's linear constructions
from the second half of the 1960s reflected on the nature of
perception; they did not impose strong 'visual constraints' on the
viewer, and this way questioned their own visual status. They
instead worked as models of perception, the wire serving as an
equivalent of the viewers' intentions, and the pedestals as an
object of perception that 'resists' that
intention.19

Accidentally or not, Tchorek's allusion to institutional
constraints emerged in the context of the 1968 political events in
Poland, and it may have marked an impulse to undermine the
coherence of the image of reality promoted by 1960s political
propaganda. Grzegorz Kowalski, in an installation entitled
Pocket (which was conceived in the aftermath of the March
'68 student riots in Warsaw and opened at Foksal Gallery on 1 June
1968), linked the transindividual aspect of experience of place, as
staged earlier by Włodzimierz Borowski with the notion of archive.
He stressed the distinction between a passive observer and an
active participant, suggesting at the same time - in
contradistinction to Borowski - an exchange of roles between the
two. A semi-transparent screen dissected the gallery space in the
spheres of 'action' and 'observation' with 'well-known images' (as
the note in the exhibition catalogue says) of historical events and
persons projected onto its surface from one end of the room, and
silhouettes of entering visitors projected onto it by flashes of
spotlight from the other.

The choice of projected images in Kowalski's work was determined
by the thematic criterion of collision between human individuals
and twentieth-century political systems, including representations
of total submission and destructive social energy. A veiled
political comment, Kowalski's Pocket reflected on the
dialectic nature of historical processes and the impossibility of
escaping them.

IV.

Some members of the Foksal group saw Kantor's happenings and the
March 1968 events as a challenge to the principles of the theory of
place, and began to reformulate them. Coupled with Borowski's
'elimination of art from art', Kantor's idea of a work escaping
space and time determinations prompted a new attitude of gallery
self-criticism, explicit in a programmatic text from December 1968
titled 'What don't we like about the Foksal PSP Gallery?'. Insofar
as the 'Introduction to a General Theory of Place' called into
question the traditional notion of the art exhibition, the new
declaration, signed simply 'Foksal PSP', questioned the traditional
model of the gallery - its rules for organising exhibitions, its
attachment to a particular place and its techniques of promotion
and criticism. The text referred to artistic manifestations linked
to the notion of activity, happening within the 'NOW' and
'EVERYWHERE'. The exclamation 'Let's look for undefined
places!'20 broke with the notion of artwork as an
environment, and gave it a much more dynamic and active nature. The
question is whether these formulations marked an expansion or a
narrowing down of the initial meaning of the notion of place.
Significantly, Assemblage d'hiver, the project organised
by Foksal Gallery to accompany the declaration on 18 January 1969,
took the shape of a happening of indefinite duration. As a matter
of fact, it continued, with breaks, until the end of April that
same year. In her description of the project, Anka Ptaszkowska
associated it with a Situationist idea of intervening in the
homogeneous space of spectacle: 'Assemblage d'hiver was
initiated in January 1969. Each artist conducts an independent
action within its structure. He or she undertakes it in an
arbitrary moment in time, or abandons it, acting alone or in
public. Assemblage d'hiver is not subject to any time
coordinates, as this would link the happening with a spectacle; it
is a permanent and secular action. Assemblage d'hiver is
not limited to a particular place. It takes place within the
gallery space and outside of it. It may expand into the streets,
take possession of the façade, become suspended in the air,
etc.'21 Inspired by Kantor, the project embraced such
actions as Zbigniew Gostomski's covering of the gallery windows
with packing paper, Maria Stangret's painting of the gallery
thresholds and the trees outside of it, Jerzy Bereś's guarding the
'Easter eggs' (field stones), or Krasiński's unrolling a coil of
'endless' blue cable along the streets of Warsaw.

Kantor's contribution to Assemblage d'hiver included an
action that focused on the idea of work in a state of suspension
between the sender and the reciever, already suggested in his
Letter. On the first day of the project, he performed the
action The Typing Machine with Sail and Steer. Surrounded
by the public, he typed his ideas about the nature of art onto
sheets of paper, which he then rolled up and locked in a
cylindrical container which he suspended on chains. During the
action he inscribed a definitive statement on the gallery wall:
'The end of so-called participation'. The history seemed to have
completed a full circle at that point. With his announcement,
Kantor questioned Tchorek's notion of place and, what is more, he
seemed to force a theoretical split in the Foksal Gallery milieu by
making it choose between a disengaged model of art as an isolated
message and a formal idea of place as active participation. The
nature of the problem consisted in his reception of an idea of
place as an artistic concept.

V.

It is difficult to weigh the effects that Tadeusz Kantor's
interventions had on Foksal Gallery. One thing is certain: his
ideas and artistic proposals contributed greatly to the new
direction in the gallery's activities, which around the year 1970
turned towards Conceptual art, exemplified in the ideas developed
at that time by Zbigniew Gostomski. On the occasion of the Artists'
and Scientists' Symposium in Wrocław in 1970, Gostomski proposed
the Fragment of the System - also known as It Begins
in Wrocław - a key work of Polish Conceptualism. It consisted
of a fragment of the city map - with the symbolic scheme of
cartography imposed on it - and a verbal statement locating in the
city of Wrocław three types of constructions identified with the
symbols 'O', '/' and 'Ø'. The work does not define the form of the
constructions, but points out where they are situated. The system
itself is the basic idea of the project, and is limited only by the
starting point: 'It begins in Wrocław. It could start anywhere. /
It begins in a definite area, / but it need not end there. / It is
potentially endless.'22 In this way, Gostomski proposed
a model of a work as an 'absolute environment'.

Wiesław Borowski associated both Gostomski's and Kantor's
practices with an 'a-pictorial strand at the Foksal PSP Gallery'.
In Borowski's article of that title from 1971, he discussed a new
idea of abstraction in art characterised not as a 'visual (sensual)
qualification of a work', but as its 'capability to embrace the
whole of the creative process, as a capability of thought and an
attribute of consciousness'.23 Adhering to a
disinterested model of art, promoted by Kantor in his '1970
Manifesto', Borowski neutralised the role of perception, and
privileged the artwork's function instead. 'These works are not
addressed to any viewer,' he wrote. 'They assert a constant
presence of illegitimate and disinterested actions, not demanding
the necessity of justification, at present or in the future,
without an indispensable need for preserving them with help of any
means. These actions are immediate, one-off, neither tied to a
place or material, nor to time.'24 In short, the works
under discussion became, in a way, placeless.

The idea of 'placelessness' of work was positively sanctioned in
two texts published by the Foksal Gallery in August 1971. Authored
by Wiesław Borowski and the young art critic Andrzej Turowski,
these statements formulated a utopian postulate of preserving a
work endowed with the status of an 'isolated message' in a virtual
state, not intoxicated by operations of delivery and reception.
Employing a metaphor taken from Kantor, they referred to a work
functioning in a 'negative' form beyond the realms of expression
and perception. The first text, titled 'Documentation', quoted a
passage from the script of the Panoramic Sea Happening,
which described the drowning of the Foksal Gallery documentation,
and was accompanied by a photograph illustrating the event. It
critically assessed institutionalised conventions of preserving
various forms of art documentation, which turns it into a
fetishised art form. As the declaration reads: 'Without our notice,
the DOCUMENTATION became identical to the museum and collection,
assuming their forms and manners.'25 The second text,
titled 'The Living Archives', proposed a programme of reformulation
of the gallery principles which would make it possible to recognise
a work 'as neutrally present', disentangled from everyday life
conditions of creation and interpretation.26 It proposed
the idea of a work as a trace of a living thought recognised in its
past condition: 'The LIVING ARCHIVES marks the past condition of
thought vis-à-vis its presentation.'27 'The Living
Archives' implied yet another modification of the gallery model.
Various documents sent by a number of artists at Borowski and
Turowski's request were presented twice - in September 1971 and
from June to September 1972 - in the gallery's exhibition space,
arranged in the form of a reading room. The first display was
accompanied by a statement inscribed on the gallery wall denying
its status as an 'art show', and associating it instead with a new
kind of institution - one responsive to the nature of new artistic
facts. The display was also characterised in terms of its
intervention 'in the mechanism of the institution's functioning'
and as a 'break in presenting artistic activities'.

When asked in 1998 whether the notion of work as an 'isolated
message' coincided with his understanding of Conceptual art,
Andrzej Turowski emphasised the general character of this idea,
reflective of a range of new attitudes manifest in exhibitions or
events such as 'January 1-31, 1969', 'Op Losse Schroeven', Prospekt
69 and 'When Attitudes Become Form'.28 His idea of
Conceptual art was altogether different from the one anticipated
and tested by Kantor and Borowski. In his text 'Remarks on the
Definition of Art', published in the Foksal Gallery bulletin
One in April 1972, he linked Conceptual art proper to a
tautological activity, one located on the meta-level of reflection
rather than on a nominative level. The latter he identified with
acts of identification of an object as art, exemplified by Kantor's
Conceptual Emballages (1970). 'Conceptual art', he wrote,
'must refer to a concept which is contained in or entailed by a
concept, i.e. it must be meta-art with respect to art defined in
terms of concepts.'29 In other words, he subscribed to
an analytical model of Conceptual art, which aligned the artwork
with a theoretical statement. Turowski's ideas emerged, however,
apart from the predominant practices in Poland at the time. Even if
it were possible to distinguish theoretical elements in the work of
artists cooperating with the gallery, such as Zbigniew Gostomski,
Stanisław Dróżdż, Jarosław Kozłowski and Krzysztof Wodiczko, the
analytical model of Conceptual art is not a distinct phenomenon in
the Polish context. It reflects the 'global' dimension of
Conceptual art, rather than the specific form of ideologically
neutral (dystopian) and iconoclastic reductionism prevalent amongst
local practices. What hopefully has become clear by now is that it
did not cohere with the initial notion of place. Had this notion
been sufficiently developed, it could have linked the development
of Polish Conceptualism with a theorisation of the nature of
perception. In the face of increasing political restrictions at the
end of the 1960s, the social dimension of theory of place was
silenced, but today remains a possibility.

As the 'Introduction' reads: 'The PLACE is neither a
construction nor a destruction. It comes into being as a result of
a careless decision. The PLACE has no sufficient reason in the
world. It is in the artist that this reason subsists. It is he that
calls forth the PLACE.' M. Tchorek et al., 'An Introduction to the
General Theory of Place', op. cit.↑

The opening coincided with the suppression of student
demonstrations by the security forces and what the official
propaganda called the 'labour activists' - groups of Warsaw's
factory workers - in the area of the University of Warsaw and the
Academy of Fine Arts at Krakowskie Przedmieście Street. This was
the moment when the art world was taken by surprise: the pristine
whiteness of the display and the fragile character of Krasiński's
works contrasted with the violent character of the events occurring
only several hundred metres away.↑

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